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Art as a whole is a riddle. Another way of putting this is to say that art expresses something while at the same time hiding it.

Theodor Adorno

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Theodor Adorno
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More quotes by Theodor Adorno

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If across the Atlantic the ideology was pride, here it is delivering the goods.
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What the philosophers once knew as life has become the sphere of private existence and now of mere consumption, dragged along as an appendage of the process of material production, without autonomy or substance of its own.
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Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices.
Theodor Adorno
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In the general tendency toward specialization, philosophy too has established itself as a specialized discipline, one purified of all specific content. In so doing, philosophy has denied its own constitutive concept: the intellectual freedom that does not obey the dictates of specialized knowledge.
Theodor Adorno
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Life has changed into a timeless succession of shocks, interspaced with empty, paralysed intervals.
Theodor Adorno
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The idea that after this war life will continue 'normally' or even that culture might be 'rebuilt' - as if the rebuilding of culture were not already its negation - is idiotic.
Theodor Adorno
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True thoughts are those alone which do not understand themselves.
Theodor Adorno
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Tenderness between people is nothing other than awareness of the possibility of relations without purpose.
Theodor Adorno
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Once the last trace of emotion has been eradicated, nothing remains of thought but absolute tautology.
Theodor Adorno
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The empirical usability of the sacred ceremonial words makes both the speaker and listener believe in their corporeal presence.
Theodor Adorno
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Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they’re only animals.
Theodor Adorno
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Fear and destructiveness are the major emotional sources of fascism, eros belongs mainly to democracy.
Theodor Adorno
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As a constellation, theoretical thought circles the concept it would like to unseal, hoping that it may fly open like the lock of a well-guarded safe-deposit box: in response, not to a single key or a single number, but to a combination of numbers
Theodor Adorno
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History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it.
Theodor Adorno
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Proletarian language is dictated by hunger. The poor chew words to fill their bellies.
Theodor Adorno
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The need to let suffering speak is a condition of all truth. For suffering is objectivity that weighs upon the subject
Theodor Adorno
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All testify to the coercion and sacrifice which culture imposes on man. To rely on them and deny the decline is to become even more firmly caught in its fatal coils.
Theodor Adorno
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On their way toward modern science human beings have discarded meaning. The concept is replaced by the formula, the cause by rules and probability.
Theodor Adorno
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The basest person is capable of perceiving the weaknesses of the greatest, the most stupid, the errors in the thought of the most intelligent.
Theodor Adorno
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Vague expression permits the hearer to imagine whatever suits him and what he already thinks in any case.
Theodor Adorno